


The Taste of Love

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: One Shot, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-01
Updated: 2006-09-01
Packaged: 2019-01-19 11:09:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12409200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: A short glimpse into a young woman who traveled from frivolous flings to a devouring love. She comes to see that love builds upon itself and that spiritual relationships can't exist without the meaningless ones that came before them.





	The Taste of Love

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

** The Taste of Love **

I kissed a boy.

Then, years and years later I kissed a man.

I could remember the difference. I could feel it too. I can still remember the details now because of an excellent memory most likely inherited from my Great Uncle, John Hubert III (a famed historian and mild alcoholic). The difference was bigger than an ocean. There was ripple tides blasting the bigness into my thought.

Kissing the boy was wonderful because it was so sweet and so young. We both felt like we were conspiring together, bent into this bed in a covert operation. We were living our lives, so young and kissing. His lips were smooth and wet. His tongue pulled into mine and we were like two magnets. He was pulling down my throat into deep into my body. We opened our eyes and looked at each other, then broke into ribbons of laughter. Our kiss was young and delicate. It felt so innocent. I was conjuring his fantasies of lady lips. How many hours had he spent dreaming of kissing girls and running his fingers along their shirts? I didn’t know but I would guess a few. I kissed with my youngness. So deep beneath blankets, half-embarrassed and half in love. We were two creatures completing each other under the willows of cloth and night. 

Kissing the man was different. He had a low furrowed brow and lines of wrinkle along his forehead. The skin around his eyes sagged and the look in his eyes was of sad, guilty love. I had never felt love so strong. It was different than the boy. I only wanted to kiss the boy to complete him. I wanted, more than anything else, to _save_ the man. He was so sad and so lonely. You could see it in his breath, he was ready to die. I wanted to rescue him and nurse him back to youth. Run my fingers over his fine lines until they smoothed into putty. I wanted to kiss his eyelids and his stomach and his ears like the spring kissed the earth. Watch them bloom. He sat in his dark house with his sad eyes reading and smoking a pipe like Sherlock Holmes. I needed to fix that. My mother would say I was a healer but she didn’t know much about me. This man, he knew everything. He had watched three of his best friends die. He had watched the last sentenced to Azkaban with a wild look in his eye, thrashing against guards and yelling of his own innocence. Now he was watching me pull his worn black shirt up over his head. He was watching me kiss the skin along his ribs and softened gut. He was watching me pull off my clothes until I stood in front of this him nothing more than a bundle of skin. 

The boy’s eyes were bright as flames, hot as embers. They looked through me and felt the burdens of lust and naivety. He was captivated and entranced. _This was what it looked like_. His eyes burned blue through my skin.

The man’s eyes were full and heavy. They were unthinkably sad. He looked like he might cry but I didn’t know why. “What’s wrong?” I said with naked hands on my naked hips. My hair was down long with his fingers running though it.

“I can’t, I shouldn’t do this.” 

“Why not?” My lips were on his chest, my hair falling against his skin. 

“You are so young and I am…”

“So sad, Remus. And it kills me. It rips me to shreds. I want to see you smile, I want to kiss you over and over  and over again until you’re happy and free and you want to frolic through sunny fields singing like a madman.”

“I’ll walk through a sunny field with a bottle of whiskey, if that helps.”

“Fair compromise. I’ll be happy and you’ll be drunk. We can kiss for hours.” The sides of his mouth crinkled and let out the smallest smile. To me it looked like dry towels when you’re drenched and empty rooms when you’ve been crying for hours. “Aha! You’re smiling Remus.” I pushed my fingers against the sides of his mouth pressing his lips into a big clown smile. I wondered if he had secretly forgotten what it felt like. 

Boys smile and its nothing. They smile because they think you’re pretty. They smile because of food and jokes and sleep and pranks. They smile because they just scored a goal or mastered a spell or broke a rule. They smiled for everything and it was infectious. A contagion running rampant through boys and girls everywhere. I was convinced at one time that their smile was the reason for rainbows and sunny days and green, green grass. That maybe nature saw them too.

When men smile it’s for other things. When men smile they are in love. At least when they smile like that. They are smiling from the depths of their soul; from the blood in their veins to the color in their hair. Men smile because they have to and because they can’t stop it. They smile because of someone else’s bliss. 

The lips of boys are smooth and unravaged. They feel like tin. Running your lips along cool, melted tin. 

The man’s lips were dry and chapped. They were soft as bark. Not puffed with youth but punctured with age. They kissed you slow and dry and you could feel every crease and every fold. He kissed me for so long with just his lips, running his hands along my back. And then his mouth parted and I could feel the wet heat and it was like nothing I had ever encountered. That split second when his mouth opened and our pink heat met was more explosive than an orgasm and more intimate the hours of love making. I wanted to cry. I wanted to leap up and scream, half from terror and half from ecstasy. He tasted like cigars and time. His tongue still ran slow and sweet against mine. Then we were kissing faster and harder and he was sucking all the life out of me, he was pulling me into his sadness and giving me the chance to change it. I had never kissed like this. It was like living a life, like reading an epic. It left me cold and exhausted, it left me in love.  

I might have felt puppy love, years and years ago. It might have been some sort of love with boys; with their smooths of light hair and their still growing hands. I might have been in love with their enthusiasm. Loved them because they loved me. It might have been love when we spoke for hours, when they unceremoniously squeezed my chest. I didn’t feel much. Not emotionally, certainly not sexually. But the little that I did feel was good. It was nice. Maybe it was happiness, maybe it was contentedness. I guess I’ll never know. But it wasn’t _real_ love. That is for sure.

_Real_ love is the most painful, exhilarating feeling that ever existed. It hurts so much because you know that they are perfect for you. That they understand every last thing that you say. It hurts so much because you want to spend every last second with them; you want to be close to them. No, not close, inside them. You want to cure every one of their ailments and make them happier than even you have been. What we had was the most dangerous kind: forbidden love. He was a werewolf for god’s sakes and I was twenty-three. He was delicious and so sad. After that kiss my whole life was gone. I would never not love him. I would never not care. I felt a sickness because I had found religion in him. My whole life was devoted to this love. At such a young age I was devout. The piety of love read like pages of the bible but it scalded your skin and parted its mouth for you. It watched you without our clothes on, nearly crying at how beautiful he was. It was a deep, withering sickness that rubbed you to core. Once you were in love, once I was in love I never fell out.

I kissed a boy who elicited feeling of happiness and subtle thrill. I kissed a boy with soft, wet lips who would open my body and make it ready for love someday. I kissed a boy who unbuckled my pants and who I saw in class and who thought I was pretty.

Then, years and years later I kissed a man and fell in love. I kissed a man whose sadness nearly killed me, whose rough spoiled skin tasted like amber, whose deep voice haunted me in my dreams and in my days. I kissed a man who sunk into my body and made me explode with feeling, who kissed me dry and then kissed me wet, who sat with me drunk. He was a man who had never asked for love, who only waited for death to reach him. A man who saw my young skin and nearly broke into tears, who thought I was crazy and wild with youth. He wanted to teach me of love and ecstasy and all-encompassing thought. He overtook my soul and bore his sweet taste to my parched lips. He solved my problems and shattered my life. He fixed everything with glue and tape, tacked together against some foreign corkboard. I kissed a man who broke my heart a thousand times over and fixed it each time with heavy taste of that love-struck kiss. 

**Author's Note** : This is a one-shot I wrote quite some time ago. It's unedited and a bit cheesy, but who doesn't love some good old fashioned tonks-and-remus-loving, eh? My post is dedicated to Shuby becuase she is a dear and an excellent writer who I quite admire :) 


End file.
